Climate change organisations and activists from all over Devon came together on Saturday 7th March and have decided to create the Devon Climate Action Network (Devon CAN) – a county-wide network devoted to raising awareness and making a positive difference in the face of climate change and its potentially disastrous consequences. Sixty-one delegates were present - comprising 26 groups including 8 'Transition' initiatives and 5 stakeholder groups including the Energy Saving Trust and the Community Council of Devon - at the Embercombe centre on the outskirts of Exeter. Attending from all corners of the county, travelling from as far afield as South Molton, Axminster and Plymouth, the gathering unanimously decided to join forces and cr...

WWF's (World Wildlife Fund for Nature) Earth Hour It's time to show we care about the world, it's natural environments, it's people and it's wildlife. Saturday 28th March 2009 at 8.30pm is the WWF's Earth Hour and you can join millions of people around the globe by switching off your lights for 1 hour. Make a statement and help send a message to the political leaders of the world. The WWF are attempting to have 1 billion people across the globe join together for one aim, helping climate change. During last year's Earth hour around 50 million people in more than 370 towns and cities across the globe switched off their lights for one hour.  Even landmarks switched off their lights including the Eiffel tower and Sydney ...

Asia's largest shantytown - 175-acre Dharavi, Mumbai, India, home to more than 600,000 people, has been made popular as a tourist destination  by the Oscar winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire" to such an extent that a global online tourism vendor, Expedia.com has unveiled a Oscar holiday destination package featuring Dharavi and the city of Mumbai as one of the hottest tourism destinations this spring and summer.   Movies are known to inspire travel to destinations where they have been filmed. What drives tourists is the fascination of picturing scenes in the film and then comparing it to real life to get a strange sense of déjà vu.   Some consider it voyeurism   There are opposing views on whether slum tourism is touris...

India, a nation with great linguistic diversity, tops the Unesco’s list of countries having maximum number of dialects on the verge of extinction. With 196 of its languages listed as endangered, India is closely followed by the US which stands to lose 192 languages and Indonesia, where 147 are in peril.   These figures were released on the eve of International Mother Language Day on February 21, 2009 in the latest Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing unveiled by the UN’s cultural agency Unesco.   The atlas classifies around 2,500 of the 6,000 languages spoken worldwide as endangered. It further adds that nearly 200 languages have fewer than 10 speakers and 178 others have between 10 and 50 speakers. It r...

Who cares? After a long and hard think as to why I should place this journal about my opinions I realized it's about our children, yes  even teenagers (under 16) are still classed as children or have we forgotten this?  Despite most losing there innocents or so it seems because of the way of the world I see the down-side to today's society and the by-product so to speak of how our children behave.  I care about how children act and behave!  I see far too many teenagers becoming social outcasts by decent people and frowned upon, I see increasing trouble on the streets, in our schools and in the home.  Teenagers confining themselves to their rooms, locked into their computers or games consoles lost in another world while mum and po...

''It's life, Jim, but not as we know it''. Those immortal lines uttered by ''Bones'' McCoy on 60s sci-fi show, Star Trek. Those Trekkies amongst you will remember he was surgically rendering the wound of a giant silicon-based mole with masonry plaster - bish, bosh, sorted! It showed imagination on the part of the creators to cast a lump of animated rock as intelligent life. Since Roswell, most of us by now have that stereotypical green, lozenge-faced, lollipop creep with the large, black almond eyes firmly fixed in our psyche. Sure, before that artist's impression appeared in the press, ET came in all shapes and sizes, but common folk believe what they see in their papers and now we all know what to expect - old spooky head! Anyway,...

Measuring the pulse rate has long been an indicator of a person's well-being; it is now often one of the first things a health practitioner will check during a patient consultation. Now, according to results of a new study, simply measuring a woman's resting pulse rate can predict how likely she is to suffer a heart attack. The study on 129,000 post menopausal women with no history of heart problems, claims that those with the highest heart rates were found to be significantly more likely to suffer a heart attack than the women with the lowest rates. Responding to the study published in the BMJ, Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "This shows that having a high heart rate is a ris...

Could there be a worse time to resign from a well-paid job in order to follow my heart, conscience and intuition, and trust that everything will work out? Probably not. Have we, the human race, got time to waste - in the face of environmental, economic and social catastrophe? I think not. When I took on my most recent and lucrative contract, I made a verbal agreement with my employer that I would leave if it ever felt like a job. It did, so I've just quit. Whilst doing that job (co-creating this very site), it became clear that we are on the edge of potentially disastrous global changes, that through denial and despair, we are hopelessly failing to address. I'm now in no doubt that we are past choice. In essence, we (in ...

Barack Obama has ambitious plans about harnessing the sun, wind and soil to fuel cars and run factories. The new president has pledged to reduce America's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 80% (below 1990 levels) by 2050.   How successful he will be only time will tell. But his efforts are going to go a long way to improve US' image as an unrepentant polluter.   President Obama also intends to introduce a market-based cap and trade system to meet these reduction targets. Any cap and trade system adopted by the Obama government should allow trade in CO2 offsets from developing countries, including India.   The US will also invest $150 billion over the next 10 years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy futu...

I have just watched the inauguration of President Obama and can only begin to imagine what it must feel like to be a an African American. For that moment in time I suspended all preconceived ideas, judgements, previous 'wrong doings' of previous presidents and took in that moment in history. I looked at the faces of those people in the crowd who lived with fear, inequality injustice,segregration and were part of the civil rights movement and I itried to maginewhat today might feel like for them and then the famous words (or should I say prophecy) of Martin Luther King ' I have a dream...' ran through my mind and heart. So suspended in that moment I am filled with hope and the belief that all things are possible and the more pe...